pinyin

Alternative form of Pinyin.

Alternative form of Pinyin.

For quotations using this term, see Citations:pinyin.

A system of romanization for Standard Mandarin, used in the People’s Republic of China, and more recently in other Mandarin Chinese-speaking areas as well.

The Chinese government began using the new system Jan. 1 in all its foreign language publications, including the English-language service of the New China News Agency. This is an important source for American journalists writing about China. The United Nations and U.S. government agencies have adopted the new spellings called by the Chinese "Pinyin" meaning "phonetic spelling."[…] The old spelling system, named the Wade-Giles system after the two 19th century Britons who developed it, made correct pronunciation unnecessarily difficult. It used apostrophes to distinguish aspirated consonants, such as p'ai pronounced with a "p" sound, from unaspirated, such as pai pronounced with a "b" sound. The new Pinyin system eliminates this distinction, which most newspapers ignored anyway. "Beijing" is much closer to the Chinese pronunciation that "Peking", and Vice Premier "Deng" is better rendering than "Teng." But the new system uses some letters in ways that still confuse English speakers. Thers difficult letters are: "c" which should be prounced in this system like the "ts" in "its"; "q" which should be pronounced like the "ch" in "cheek"; "x" which should be pronounced like the "sh" in "she"; and "zh" which should be pronounced like the "j" in "jump".[…] Reading the alphabetized words still presents problems for the Chinese, however, because the spellings do not distinguish the flur separate tones in the Chinese language that can significantly change meaning. The word "ma" can mean "mother", "horse", or "scold", depending on what tone is used. Under the Pinyin system, two neighboring provinces of northern China are both spelled "Shanxi". In this special case, one of the provinces is now spelled "Shaanzi", to indicate a different tone in the first syllable.